A recurring theme permeates a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the tough residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of largely happily-ever-after stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
